The nuclear program that refuses to die
By: Yousaf Butt April 6, 2010 01:04 PM EST

Congress twice drove a stake through the heart of the “reliable replacement warhead” program, a plan for newly designed nuclear warheads. Congress cut off all funding in 2007 then cut it off again in 2008.

But the program is about to rise from the grave.

These replacement warheads are a bargaining chip in a bigger nuclear game. The Obama administration wants the Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It needs Republican cooperation to do this. So the new warheads' advocates are seizing this opportunity to resurrect this undead nuclear program.

While not directly advocating new warheads, Turner's message was clear: We would be better off making new — and supposedly more reliable — nuclear weapons, if we are indeed planning on a smaller arsenal.

The lab directors “implicitly endorsed the idea of creating an expensive new generation of more reliable nuclear warheads,” William Broad wrote in The New York Times.

Generally speaking, most Democrats now favor the test ban treaty and do not support these replacement nuclear weapons. They assert the program is unnecessary, expensive and sends the wrong message just as Washington is trying to persuade others, notably North Korea and Iran, not to pursue nuclear weapons.

Many Republicans, however, strongly criticize the test ban treaty and endorse the new warheads program. They say that new nuclear weapons would only improve U.S. security.

The grand bargain in the offing could mean that the test ban treaty is ratified with Republican support — contingent, that is, on funding these new warheads.

But this quid pro quo could prove dangerous to both the credibility of U.S. nuclear deterrent forces and our nonproliferation efforts. It should be strenuously resisted.

The linkage between the new warheads program and the test ban treaty was laid out during the waning days of the Bush administration. The Defense and Energy Departments issued a joint report that placed a high priority on new warheads.

The Bush administration essentially threatened to renew the testing of already well-tested legacy warheads unless Congress adopted the new weapons program. "Without nuclear testing,” the report asserted, “at some time in the future the United States may be unable to confirm the effect of the accumulation of changes to tested warhead configurations."

This careful sentence was a sort of blackmail: Buy new warheads, or the test ban treaty cannot be ratified because legacy warheads will need to be tested in future.

Washington, the blue ribbon panel noted, “has the technical capabilities to maintain confidence in the safety and reliability of its existing nuclear-weapon stockpile under [a test ban].”

While the study admitted that age-related defects (mostly of non-nuclear components) can be expected, it insisted that nuclear test explosions “are not needed to discover these problems.”

Instead, the study proposed a thorough stockpile surveillance program, remanufacturing some components to original specifications, minimizing changes to existing warheads and nonexplosive testing and repair of non-nuclear components.

What the pro-RRW lobby regularly fails to point out is that their proposed new weapons would never be tested. Though they may be based on previously tested designs, the inherent risk of making new weapons is far greater than that of continually refurbishing the tested legacy weapons.

As Richard Garwin, the longtime defense consultant who helped design the first hydrogen bomb, explained: “the stockpile weapons, as gradually modified, are closer to the test pedigree than is either of the RRW designs to a nuclear test explosion.” (The two designs he refers to were proposed by two different laboratories.)

In fact, these untested new weapons would be a less credible deterrent to any potential adversaries. For the actual reliability of a warhead — whether measured as 70 percent, 90 percent or 98 percent — matters little for deterrence when the key factor is the psychological effect of retaliatory destruction.

In addition, an untested stockpile, no matter how old, will always be considered less credible than a tested one — especially to potential adversaries.

Consider, our current warheads are approximately 98 percent reliable, with high confidence — which exceeds the reliability of their delivery vehicles.

While the laboratories' scientists may certify a new untested warhead based on its theoretically greater performance — as compared to the legacy weapons — it is inconceivable that the military would accept an arsenal of untested weapons for long.

This is not hypothetical. A similar scenario played out in France. Under President Francois Mitterrand, the French accepted untested nuclear warheads into their submarine-based stockpile, based on the results of sophisticated computer simulations. But when Jacques Chirac became president, France conducted nuclear explosions — to make sure the weapons worked.

In our culture, “new” is associated with “better,” but “new and untested” is worse than “old and tested” — especially when it comes to nuclear deterrence.

Since the “fundamental role of nuclear weapons,” as the Nuclear Posture Review released today reports, “is to deter nuclear attack on the United States” and its allies, legacy weapons would clearly be more successful than new untested warheads.

Put it this way: Would advocates for new warheads rather fly on a brand-new airliner that had never had a test flight — though leading engineers had certified its aerodynamics? Or on a “legacy” 747 that had been continually upgraded? One would hope that they would choose the 747.

So it is puzzling that they insist that untested new weapons would work better at deterring our enemies than the tested ones we have.

On the other hand, if these new warheads are tested, it would be difficult to prevent other, possibly adversarial, nations from doing so as well.

So it would be better if the warhead replacement program were finally nailed into its coffin.

Maybe this time with a silver stake through its heart.

Yousaf Butt, a physicist in the High-Energy Astrophysics Division at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has served as a fellow on the Committee on International Security and Arms Control at the National Academy of Sciences.